Modernism, Monsters, and Margaret Sanger

Abstract

Tony Telura, the young protagonist of Mary Heaton Vorse's "The Magnet," wakes up in a "spectral and dark" tenement hall to the piercing sound of a woman's screams that "slithered through him" like "a slashing knife" (8). These screams do not arise because of a ghost, vampire, or any other supernatural demon despite the gothic overtones of the story. Rather, Tony's nightmarish experience in Vorse's 1921 short story is occasioned by his mother in childbirth. A similarly disturbing picture of maternity develops in Rita Wellman's "On the Dump," a story published three years earlier in the same venue, Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review (BCR). 1 In Wellman's story, a poor, pregnant woman allows herself to become human trash, slipping to her death on a pile of "tobacco cans, old pans, dirty ripped mattresses," and one "obscene" corset (7). Mrs. Robinson's desperation at her perpetual pregnancies-she has "faced death" ten times-leaves her thinking that death on a dump heap is a welcome release and fitting end for someone society has discarded like so much trash (7). In these stories of madness and surprising violence, indeed throughout the BCR, gothic aesthetics and contraception (or the lack thereof) combine to create a singularly modernist narrative of maternity. This essay explores the intersection of modernist aesthetics and the politicized narratives of the US birth control movement. By examining the depiction of the maternal body within the texts of Sanger, Vorse, and Wellman, we see a side of aesthetic autonomy that is anything but autonomous: although artists may attempt to create